XVI. A little later on you will see Jesus submitting to be purified in the River Jordan for my Purification, or rather, sanctifying the waters by His Purification (for indeed He had no need of purification Who taketh away the sin of the world) and the heavens cleft asunder, and witness borne to him by the Spirit That is of one nature with Him; [3884] you shall see Him tempted and conquering and served by Angels, [3885] and healing every sickness [3886] and every disease, [3887] and giving life to the dead (O that He would give life to you who are dead because of your heresy), and driving out demons, [3888] sometimes Himself, sometimes by his disciples; and feeding vast multitudes with a few loaves; [3889] and walking dryshod upon seas; [3890] and being betrayed and crucified, and crucifying with Himself my sin; offered as a Lamb, and offering as a Priest; as a Man buried in the grave, and as God rising again; and then ascending, and to come again in His own glory. Why what a multitude of high festivals there are in each of the mysteries of the Christ; all of which have one completion, namely, my perfection and return to the first condition of Adam.
XVII. Now then I pray you accept His Conception, and leap before Him; if not like John from the womb, [3891] yet like David, because of the resting of the Ark. [3892] Revere the enrolment on account of which thou wast written in heaven, and adore the Birth by which thou wast loosed from the chains of thy birth, [3893] and honour little Bethlehem, which hath led thee back to Paradise; and worship the manger through which thou, being without sense, wast fed by the Word. Know as Isaiah bids thee, thine Owner, like the ox, and like the ass thy Master's crib; [3894] if thou be one of those who are pure and lawful food, and who chew the cud of the word and are fit for sacrifice. Or if thou art one of those who are as yet unclean and uneatable and unfit for sacrifice, and of the gentile portion, run with the Star, and bear thy Gifts with the Magi, gold and frankincense and myrrh, [3895] as to a King, and to God, and to One Who is dead for thee. With Shepherds glorify Him; [3896] with Angels join in chorus; with Archangels sing hymns. Let this Festival be common to the powers in heaven and to the powers upon earth. [3897] For I am persuaded that the Heavenly Hosts join in our exultation and keep high Festival with us to-day [3898] ...because they love men, and they love God just like those whom David introduces after the Passion ascending with Christ [3899] and coming to meet Him, and bidding one another to lift up the gates.
XVIII. One thing connected with the Birth of Christ I would have you hate...the murder of the infants by Herod. [3900] Or rather you must venerate this too, the Sacrifice of the same age as Christ, slain before the Offering of the New Victim. If He flees into Egypt, [3901] joyfully become a companion of His exile. It is a grand thing to share the exile of the persecuted Christ. If He tarry long in Egypt, call Him out of Egypt by a reverent worship of Him there. Travel without fault through every stage and faculty of the Life of Christ. Be purified; be circumcised; strip off the veil which has covered thee from thy birth. After this teach in the Temple, and drive out the sacrilegious traders. [3902] Submit to be stoned if need be, for well I wot thou shalt be hidden from those who cast the stones; thou shalt escape even through the midst of them, like God. [3903] If thou be brought before Herod, answer not for the most part. [3904] He will respect thy silence more than most people's long speeches. If thou be scourged, [3905] ask for what they leave out. Taste gall for the taste's sake; [3906] drink vinegar; [3907] seek for spittings; accept blows, be crowned with thorns, [3908] that is, with the hardness of the godly life; put on the purple robe, take the reed in hand, and receive mock worship from those who mock at the truth; lastly, be crucified with Him, and share His Death and Burial gladly, that thou mayest rise with Him, and be glorified with Him and reign with Him. Look at and be looked at by the Great God, Who in Trinity is worshipped and glorified, and Whom we declare to be now set forth as clearly before you as the chains of our flesh allow, in Jesus Christ our Lord, to Whom be the glory for ever. Amen.
[3842] H. E., Nic. Per., p. 399.
[3843] Ps. xcvi. 1, 11.
[3844] Exod. xiv. 20.
[3845] Isa. ix. 6.
[3846] 1 Cor. v. 17.
[3847] The meaning clearly is that the type presented by Melchisedec (Heb. vii. 3) is fulfilled in Christ. The explanation here given by S. Gregory is the ordinary one found in the Fathers. Thus, e.g., Theodoret says, "Christ our Lord is without Mother as God, for He was begotten of the Father alone; and without Father as Man, for He was born of a pure Virgin." OEcumenius has almost the exact words of Gregory. So also S. Augustine (Tract in Joann, 8), "Christ was singularly born of a Father without a Mother, of a Mother without a Father; without Mother as God, without Father as Man."
[3848] Ps. xlvii. 1.
[3849] Isa. ix. 6.
[3850] Matt. iii. 3.
[3851] Heb. xiii. 8.
[3852] 1 Cor. i. 23.
[3853] Ephes. iv. 22, 24.
[3854] 1 Cor. xv. 22.
[3855] Col. ii. 11.
[3856] Rom. v. 20.
[3857] Rom. xiii. 13.
[3858] Alluding to his own recent arrival at Constantinople, after a life spent in the distant country of Cappadocia, and in ministering in small and insignificant places like Nazianzus.
[3859] The whole of this passage occurs again verbatim in the second Oration for Easter Day, cc. iii.-ix.
[3860] John x. 15.
[3861] The Holy of Holies here means the Holy Trinity.
[3862] The reference is to the Ter Sanctus or Triumphal Hymn, which is found in every Liturgy. The previous writer referred to is thought by some to be S. Athanasius, but by others S. Dionysius the Areopagite, who has some words on this point in his treatise De Coelest. Hier., c. 7. But the most competent scholars deny the authenticity of the works attributed to S. Dionysius, and place them from one hundred to one hundred and fifty years later than S. Gregory's time.
[3863] S. Thomas Aquinas (Summa I., qu. 63, art. 7) gives reasons for thinking that Satan was originally the highest of all the angelic hosts. This, however, is an opinion in which many high authorities differ from him. At any rate, Satan as Lucifer must have held a very high place.
[3864] Evil, says Nicetas here, has no positive existence, but is the negation of good. "The faculties of mind and body which are used in a sinful action are indeed things, and are the creatures of God; but the sin itself is not a thing, and consequently not a creature. God is indeed the Author of all that is, of every substance; but sin is not a substance, and is not. It is a declination from substance and from being, and not a part of it." (Mozley, Treatise on the Augustinian doctrine of predestination.)
[3865] Ps. xix. 1, 3.
[3866] Gen. ii. 7.
[3867] Sc. a microcosm.
[3868] Heb. v. 12.
[3869] Gen. iii. 5.
[3870] Rom. i. 22-31.
[3871] Cf. Light of Light begotten. Christ our Lord is called "The Beginning of the Creation of God, because by Him all things were made; and He is of the Beginning, inasmuch as God the Father is the Unoriginate Principle of all, and the Origin and Fount of Godhead. The Scholiast here refers to Ps. cx. 3, which in the Vulgate and LXX. runs "With Thee is the Beginning in the day of Thy Power."
[3872] Cf. Theol.: IV. xx., where S. Gregory says "Perhaps this Relation might be compared to that between the Definition and the thing defined." Nicetas remarks that, just as the definition declares the nature of the defined, so the Personal Word shows forth the Nature of the Father. Suidas (in voce horos) says that the phrase is used to show the Unity of Nature between the Father and the Son. It is not, however, of frequent occurrence.
[3873] Luke i. 35.
[3874] S. Gregory does not seem to have been aware of the doctrine of the "Immaculate Conception."
[3875] See note on In Sancta Lumina, c. xiv.
[3876] John x. 11.
[3877] Luke xv. 4, sq.
[3878] Ib. xv. 8, 10.
[3879] Luke v. 29.
[3880] S. Gregory is referring to the provision of the Law, which orders a man, if he see his friend's or his enemy's ox or ass fallen under a burden or going astray, to lend assistance; but the terms of his reference are rather to the reasoning of our Lord with the Pharisees about the Sabbath. Luke xiii. 15 and xiv. 5.
[3881] Cf. en te nukti en he paredidoto, mallon de heauton paredidou. Canon of Liturgy of S. Mark (Swainson p. 517). Ea nocte qua tradidit seipsum. Lit. Copt. S. Basil (Ib.). Cum statuisset se tradere. Coptic S. Basil (Hammond, p. 209) Rot. Vatic. and Cod. Ross. of S. Mark, has only t. n. he heaut, pared. (Swainson, 50); so too S. Basil (Ib., 81) in Cod. B. M., 22749 and Barberini of S. Chrys. (Ib., 91); but the whole expression is in Chrys. (cent. xi., ib., 129) and Greek S. James (78. 272-3), but Syriac S. James has "in qua nocte tradendus erat." (Canon Univ., Æthiop. Hammond, 258). Pridie quam patereturis the form in the Canon of the Roman, Ambrosian, and Sarum Missals; but the Mozarabic, which is largely of an Eastern character, has in qua nocte tradebatur. (Hammond, 333).
[3882] The Sabellian heresy may be briefly described as the doctrine of One God exercising three offices, as opposed to the Catholic Faith of One God in three Persons. Sabellius himself was a Priest of the Libyan Pentapolis, who at Rome in the time of Pope Zephyrinus embraced the heresy of Notus, which maintained that God the Father suffered for us on the cross in the form of Christ. His followers, who openly declared themselves first about a.d. 357, thought that God, to Whom as the Source of all things the name of Father is given, is called the Son when He united Himself to the humanity of Jesus for the work of our redemption; and in like manner He is the Holy Spirit when manifested for the work of sanctification. Sabellius was condemned by a Council held at Rome, probably in 258; again at Nicæa, and again at Constantinople, where Sabellian Baptism was pronounced invalid.
[3883] Arianism was the result of a strong opposition to Sabellianism, coupled with a misunderstanding of the argument against it. There was, no doubt, a danger of falling into the opposite error of Tritheism, to avoid which Arianism "divided the Substance" and virtually--and in the end explicity--denied the Godhead of our Lord Jesus Christ. Arius was a Priest of Alexandria, and it was there that he began to publish his opinions, in the early years of the Fourth Century (318); but Newman traces the origin of the heresy to Antioch and its Judaizing tendency. At a meeting of the clergy in Alexandria the Bishop, S. Alexander, gave an address on the coeternity, and coequality of the Father and the Son, and used the expression ten auten ousian echein, that They had the same Substance. Arius protested against this as a Sabellian statement, and used the words ktisma (creature) and poiema (a thing made) of the Son, adding the sentence which became so famous, en hote ouk en,--there was a time when the Son did not exist. Having ineffectually tried private remonstrance, S. Alexander brought the matter in 321 before his Provincial Synod, in which were present about 100 Egyptian and Pentapolitan Bishops, who after giving the matter a patient hearing, excommunicated Arius and his principal adherents. But it was too late to undo the mischief. The heresy spread widely, and the whole Eastern Church was stirred by the controversy. At last a great Council of the whole Church met at Nicæa in 325, summoned by the Emperor; and there the heresy was unequivocally condemned, and the great Creed propounded with its watchword, the Homoousion. The false teaching had however struck its roots deep and wide; and though now banned by the anathema of the Church, it was long in dying; and indeed at one time, it seemed as if--humanly speaking--it must swamp the whole Catholic Church. Under various forms the Semi-Arians who claimed to differ from the faith of Nicæa only by a single letter, the Aetians and Eunomians, who went to the furthest extreme of the Falsehood (Anomoeans), and many others, the heresy spread far and wide: and when S. Gregory came to Constantinople there was not one Catholic Church or Priest to be found in the place, and only a few scattered folk who still held to the Faith of the Consubstantial. Gregory's wonderful discourses however came to their aid, and partly under his presidency was held the Second OEcumenical Synod, which condemned the heresy of Macedonius, a still further development of Arianism, which denied also the Deity of the Holy Ghost. Arianism survived for another two centuries among the Goths and Vandals, the Burgundians and Lombards; but it never rose again as a power in the Church.